Virtues of Miami Vice

by CHRIS TOOKEY, Daily Mail

Last updated at 10:36 04 August 2006

Did you adore the Hollywood remake of Starsky And Hutch? If so, the chances are you'll hate this. Anyone who feels nostalgic for the pastel colours and plastic performances of the 1984-1989 TV series should avoid this remake of Miami Vice, which aims for something much darker and grittier.

Nor can I recommend it to people who like dialogue they can hear. The combination of over-elaborate sound effects, police and underworld jargon, atrocious diction and (especially from leading lady Gong Li) English-mangling accents, makes for an experience that's exceptionally hard on the ears.

During the first hour or so, it's impossible to understand what's going on. No movie should place this much strain on an audience's patience. But it's worth persevering to the final hour, much of which is terrific.

Writer-director Michael Mann, who worked on Miami Vice in the Eighties, has done exactly the opposite of what Hollywood did to Starsky and Hutch.

He has refused to treat Miami Vice lightly, as harmless kitsch. He has updated and improved it, making it more stylish, cool, sexy and authentic.

The film remains, essentially, an overblown B-movie: a story that should have had more pace and been more straightforward.

It's about two undercover cops, the cavalier Crockett (Colin Farrell) and the more taciturn Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), posing as drug-runners to take on a South American cartel in league with a vicious gang of white supremacists.

Other movies, especially Donnie Brasco, have said more about the perils of going undercover and losing one's moral compass. There is a moment when Crockett seems in danger of doing the same, as he falls under the spell of the drug kingpin's mysterious mistress (Gong Li).

Farrell, no stranger to womanising on or off screen, plays the sensual aspect of his character very well, and recalls the exciting young talent of his first few movies (such as Tigerland), not the way-out-of-his-depth leading man he appeared to be in Alexander and The New World.

The love scenes between Farrell and Li have a rare degree of sexual chemistry, though Mann (no doubt celebrating the freedom of cinema to be more sensuous than U. S. TV) allows them to go on unnecessarily long.

But when the casino chips are down, you know whom Crockett really loves — it's Tubbs. To his credit, Mann resists the temptation to turn their relationship into gay camp, but instead shows rather sensitively the bond between men who risk their lives for each other.

There's a lesson here for other makers of buddy-buddy movies: whatever else you do, take that central relationship seriously.

While the diction of the leading actors could be clearer, they are convincing cops. They did a lot of training, and though they are as stylishly dressed as their telly predecessors (and sartorially rather more to my taste, since they steer away from dodgy pastels), they're never mere clothes horses.

They look as if they know what they are doing, especially when it comes to handling guns and powerboats.

The principal weakness of the new Miami Vice (its length of more than two hours) turns out to be a source of strength. Mann's obsession with the minutiae of police procedure makes the first hour heavy going, but it creates a realism that pays dividends later on.

Will Miami Vice satisfy audiences? Certainly not everyone. Like Mann's last three thrillers, Heat, The Insider and Collateral, it shows a greater interest in character interplay than action, which is why Miami Vice is likely to impress critics more than teenage audiences conditioned to expect non-stop mayhem.

But, as the climactic battle in Heat showed, the director has a real flair for gunplay.

When people are shot or injured in a Mann picture, there's an impact, both visceral and emotional, that you just don't get with other film-makers.

This is down to careful establishment of character, but most of all to expert manipulation of the audience's point of view through sound and camera angles. At the screening I attended, the deaths of the bad guys were greeted with cheering — something you rarely hear in this age of cryogenically frozen cool.

The impact of Miami Vice is heightened by Mann's decision to shoot the film on high-definition video, much as he did on Collateral, with the same Australian cinematographer, Dion Beebe. The results are tough, raw and energising.

There's no better director than Mann at using architecture to create a sense of modernity and soullessness.

His characters are constantly battling the hardness, solidity and sheer enormity of their surroundings.

Interestingly, he doesn't let the environment dwarf his protagonists or cow them into submission (as, say, Bertolucci did in The Conformist).

Instead, he has his heroes loom large in the foreground.

They're little men, called upon to accomplish great things.

Miami Vice is a tricky movie to recommend. It's humourless, needlessly long and hellishly over-complicated for a summer blockbuster; but I greatly admired the second half.

Mann's achievement — though commercially it may be his downfall — is that he has made a picture that's more of an upmarket art film in disguise, than it is a conventional thriller.